176. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Details of Arrest of Jihad Shuman.”
177. Ibid.; United Press International, “Israel Jails Hezbollah Man with British Passport,” February 21, 2001.
178. Bell, Cold Terror, 85.
179. Schweitzer, “Export and Import of Suicide Bombers.”
180. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Details of Arrest of Jihad Shuman.”
181. Israeli intelligence summary, “The Logic of Action and the Mode of Operation of the Hezbollah,” author’s personal files, November 29, 2011.
182. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Arrest of Hizbullah Agent from Kalansua,” press release, August 6, 2008.
183. Israeli intelligence summary, “Logic of Action.”
184. Alexander Ritzmann, “Hezbollah’s Fundraising Organisation in Germany: The Orphans Project Lebanon Promotes Martyrdom in Lebanon with German Taxpayers’ Money,” European Foundation for Democracy, July 2009.
185. Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, “Hezbollah, Part 1: Profile of the Lebanese Shiite Terrorist Organization of Global Reach Sponsored by Iran and Supported by Syria,” Special Information Paper, July 2003, 92.
186. US Department of the Treasury, “Twin Treasury Actions Take Aim at Hizballah’s Support Network,” July 27, 2007.
187. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Arrest of Hizbullah Agent from Kalansua.”
188. Ibid.
189. Israel Security Agency, Data and Trends in Palestinian Terror, “Palestinian Terror in 2008: Statistics and Trends,” December 2008; Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Arrest of Hizbullah Agent from Kalansua.”
190. Israel Defense Forces, “Israeli Arab Indicted in Hezbollah Plot to Assassinate Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi,” August 31, 2009.
191. Ibid.
192. Amost Harel, Jalal Bana, Baruch Kra, “Bedouin Officer Says He’s Innocent of Spying for Hezbollah, Drug Dealing,” Haaretz, October 25, 2002; “Israeli Colonel Jailed for Spying,” BBC News, June 19, 2006; author interview, former senior Israeli official, Washington, DC, August 22, 2011.
193. Author interview, former senior Israeli official, Washington, DC, August 22, 2011.
194. Yaakov Katz, “Israeli-Arab Indicted for Hizbullah Plot to Assassinate Ashkenazi,” Jerusalem Post, August 31, 2009.
195. Author interview, former senior Israeli official, Washington, DC, August 22, 2011.
196. Israel Defense Forces, “Israeli Arab Indicted in Hezbollah Plot”; Katz, “Israeli-Arab Indicted for Hizbullah Plot to Assassinate Ashkenazi.”
197. “Former Shin Bet Official: Iran Knew of Israeli Arab Shadowing Ashkenazi,” Jerusalem Post, March 9, 2009.
198. Ofra Edelman, “Israeli Arab Gets 5 Years, 8 Months for Spying on IDF Chief,” Haaretz (Tel Aviv), June 4, 2010.
199. Indictment of Ameer Makhoul in Haifa Regional Court (Hebrew), author’s personal files. See also Dan Izenberg and Yaakiv Lappin, “Israeli Arab Charged with Spying,” Jerusalem Post, May 27, 2010; “Makhoul Exposed Location of Mossad Facility,” Ynetnews, May 27, 2010; Dan Izenberg, “Makhoul Sentenced to 9 Years for Spying for Hizbullah,” Jerusalem Post, July 26, 2011.
200. Indictment of Ameer Makhoul; Izenberg and Lappin, “Israeli Arab Charged with Spying”; “Makhoul Exposed Location of Mossad Facility,” Ynetnews; Izenberg, “Makhoul Sentenced to 9 Years.”
201. Israel Security Agency, “Hizballa Activity Involving Israeli Arabs,” undated report; Margot Dudkevitch and Yaakov Katz, “Dane Recruited by Hizbullah: Shin Bet Reveals He Filmed Security Sites from Train in North,” Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2005.
202. Israel Security Agency, “Hizballa Activity Involving Israeli Arabs”; Dudkevitch and Katz, “Dane Recruited by Hizbullah.”
203. Benjamin S. Lambeth, “Air Operations in Israel’s War against Hezbollah: Learning from Lebanon and Getting It Right in Gaza,” RAND Corporation, Project Air Force, Prepared for the United States Air Force, 2011, pp. 154– 57.
204. Daniel Sobelman, New Rules of the Game: Israel and Hizballah after the Withdrawal from Lebanon, Memorandum No. 69, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University, January 2004.
205. Barak Ravid, “Senior Wanted Person Arrived 5 Minutes from the Philadelphia Corridor,” Maariv (Hebrew), September 23, 2005.
206. Ali Waked, “PA Fears Hezbollah Infiltrating Fatah,” Ynetnews, December 28, 2009.
207. Ali Waked, “Tennenbaum’s Kidnapper Recruiting for Hezbollah,” Ynetnews, August 26, 2010.
208. Yaakov Katz, “Hezbollah Threat Prompts Security for Ashkenazi,” Jerusalem Post, December 22, 2011.
209. United Press International, “Israel Fears Hezbollah Targets Top General,” January 16, 2012.
9
Finance and Logistics in Africa
AT THE ISRAELI National Security Council’s Counterterrorism Bureau, located at a military base not far from Tel Aviv, one particular stream of threat reporting commanded the nearly singular focus of senior officials for several weeks in the summer of 2008: kidnappings. And those kidnappings were happening on one particular continent: Africa.
Ever since the October 2000 kidnapping of Elhanan Tannenbaum, Israeli intelligence regularly uncovered information suggesting that Hezbollah was planning more such kidnappings. The targets, as with Tannenbaum, were Israeli business-persons, most of them former military officers or government officials. In February 2002, for instance, Hezbollah considered kidnapping an Israeli businessman in Belgium, and in April, Hezbollah agents planned to abduct an Israeli businessman in the Netherlands. Another plot, which spanned several months starting in November 2002 and running into 2003, targeted an Israeli national in Spain.1
By late 2003, Hezbollah operational planners shifted their attention south. In December 2003, they were plotting to kidnap an Israeli military-officer-turned-businessman in Cyprus.2 The Cyprus plot was foiled, but Hezbollah planners were already focused on kidnapping opportunities in Africa. Perhaps contrary to conventional wisdom, targets in Africa proved plentiful.
In October 2003, Israeli intelligence officials warned of a Hezbollah plot to kidnap Israeli businesspersons and diplomats in the Horn of Africa.3 The warning included both general threat information related to Hezbollah activity in East Africa—focused in particular on Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania—as well as detailed intelligence identifying at least one specific diplomat as a target. According to Israeli officials, the warnings came from a number of sources and were given extra attention in light of threats by Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah to “work day and night to abduct more and more Israelis” if a prisoner swap then being mediated by the Germans was not imminently concluded. (On January 29, 2004, the same day a Hamas suicide bomber struck downtown Jerusalem, Israel released several hundred prisoners in return for Tannenbaum and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers.) Asked in October 2003 if such a prisoner swap would not embolden Hezbollah to kidnap more Israelis in the future, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon replied, “If they could kidnap someone right now, you think they wouldn’t do it? They would kidnap now and they will try to kidnap in the future.”4 Later that year, Hezbollah operatives sought to kidnap a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) colonel and diamond trader in Cameroon.5
Israeli officials feared the kidnapping threat was especially acute in the Horn of Africa: “For Hezbollah, Africa constitutes a very comfortable base of operations. On the one hand, there is a strong base for extremist Islamic groups there and, on the other hand, the local security forces and intelligence agencies are very lenient.”6 Describing Hezbollah’s financial support activity in West Africa, one US official cautioned that even such support networks are “always a bit operational.”7 It therefore should not surprise that Israeli Counterterrorism Bureau officials saw the development of an effective traveler-warning system—one that would protect sensitive sources and methods while earning and maintaining the Israeli public’s trust—as one of its highest prio
rities. Officials built such a system and later partnered with a major Israeli research university to study whether the public trusted and followed the warning system. Sometimes the warnings were general; other times, they were incredibly specific and warranted a detailed briefing to the intended target. In one case, an Israeli living in Madrid was on Hezbollah’s radar as an easy target. In another, the European lover of an Israeli businessman was working with friends in Hezbollah who planned to kidnap the Israeli when the two spent a weekend away.8 Hezbollah’s interest in kidnapping Israelis appears to have been an Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) innovation—a new take on an old tactic—executed as a means of collecting intelligence and securing the release of comrades incarcerated in Israel’s and other countries’ jails, completely different from the classic model of kidnapping for ransom.
In summer 2008, six months after Imad Mughniyeh’s assassination, the Israeli Counterterrorism Bureau issued a warning specific to Hezbollah plots to attack Israeli citizens in West Africa. Unlike in previous cases, the bureau did not issue a general travel advisory warning against traveling to Africa. Instead, Israeli security officials traveled to specific communities in West Africa to warn visiting or resident Israelis about actionable threat information related to specific persons or communities. By now, Israeli officials worried about not only attacks against prominent individuals and significant targets but also low-profile attacks on targets of opportunity. With hundreds of Israelis working across the continent in endeavors ranging from large construction projects to the diamond trade, Africa provided a target-rich environment.9
The following month Israeli military officials intentionally leaked to the press the recent foiling by the Israeli security services and their local counterparts of five Hezbollah kidnapping plots in West Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Asia, respectively. The plots, Israeli security officials reported, were part of “a concerted effort by Hezbollah, backed by Iran,” to avenge Mughniyeh’s assassination. “Hezbollah is scouring for prey, and it’s going country by country” looking for a target of opportunity, an official told the press. While the assumption was that the individuals in question were targeted for kidnapping, authorities feared some or all the plots may have been attempts on their lives. “Several businessmen owe their lives and their freedom to this emergency operation,” one Israeli security source noted, adding that all the operations were conducted jointly with foreign intelligence agencies.10
Kidnapping threats persisted throughout 2009, with warnings issued about Hezbollah plots in Europe in April and in Egypt that summer. In the latter incident, only a technical malfunction saved a busload of Israeli tourists in the Sinai, en route from Taba to Sharm el-Sheikh, from a roadside explosive device that, if properly wired, could have killed dozens. Among the chief concerns of Israeli authorities at the time was the prospect that Hezbollah operatives would kidnap Israeli tourists, perhaps grabbing wounded survivors after a roadside attack, and smuggle them into the Gaza Strip through one of the many tunnels that snake their way under the border at Rafah.11
The large Lebanese diaspora in Africa has long made the continent a particularly rich source of financial and logistical support for Hezbollah. Whether their supporters in any given community are many or few, Hezbollah operatives can hide in plain sight within these communities. And they can operate with near impunity because crime and corruption are endemic to Africa. In one representative assessment, a senior law enforcement adviser for Africa at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime explained that Africa attracts international organized crime because it consists of weak states, often characterized by corruption, dominated by weak and uncoordinated law enforcement agencies, and accustomed to the involvement of high-level officials in criminal activity.12 In several African countries, a 2010 US Federal Research Division survey found, Lebanese with suspected or known ties to Hezbollah were associating themselves with key military and government officials and even heads of state to become financial advisers and confidants. From this position, the study noted, they could “pilfer millions of dollars from government contracts, kickbacks, or mismanagement of state companies.”13
Africa has served not only as a prominent cash cow for Hezbollah but also as a place where exhausted or injured Hezbollah fighters went to recuperate, reportedly including Imad Mughniyeh himself.14 With connections in the lucrative diamond industry, ties to heads of state and other prominent decision makers, and extensive business interests in Africa, prominent Lebanese Shi’a living in Africa have proven to be a critical link in Hezbollah’s foreign support network. And as the string of kidnapping plots suggests, from time to time Hezbollah operatives have tapped this network to carry out terrorist operations as well. In January 1988, a CIA intelligence assessment projected that “paralleling developments inside Lebanon, Hizballah probably will expand its influence with the Lebanese African communities.”15 How those communities migrated to Africa in the first place is a story in itself.
Hezbollah Support Networks and the Lebanese Diaspora in Africa
Maronite Christian immigrants from Lebanon, in what was then the Ottoman Empire, first arrived in West Africa in the nineteenth century, particularly in what is now Sierra Leone. The migrants were predominantly entrepreneurs either seeking to prevent their sons from being conscripted in the army under a fading Ottoman banner or fleeing financial pressures that hit Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century. Africa, however, was not their destination of choice. According to a US intelligence report, “many of these early migrants traveled to Africa because they could not meet the more stringent health requirements of the United States and because travel documents were not needed for the French and British colonies.”16
With the onset of World War I, the pace of migration increased. Some, looking for economic opportunities, were drawn to West Africa in response to British and French colonial officials who sought a foreign business class to serve as middlemen between the colonial governments and local populations—the latter of which had questionable loyalty to their colonial governments.17 Shi’a Muslim immigrants started arriving in 1903, largely in response to population pressure and poor agricultural yields in southern Lebanon, and they quickly surpassed the Lebanese Christian community in numbers. This new wave of Lebanese immigrants not only hailed from a different confessional element of Lebanese society; in some cases—like the Lebanese émigrés to the Ivory Coast—it was also largely uneducated and impoverished.18
During the first half of the twentieth century, the Lebanese Shi’a community continued to grow in numbers and political influence, especially in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone.19 In several countries, the success of Lebanese businessmen bred widespread jealousy and hostility on the part of locals. In 1919, riots broke out targeting Lebanese merchants in Freetown, Sierra Leone, who were suspected of hoarding rice at a time when the staple was scarce.20
Beginning in the 1970s, the Lebanese communities in Africa became more politicized with the arrival of additional immigrants, almost all of whom were Muslim and a majority of whom the CIA assessed were “members of Shia sects that are in practice, or at least potentially, influenced by Iran.”21 Whereas in the 1960s Christians made up nearly half the Lebanese community in the Ivory Coast, by the late 1980s their proportion had fallen to 10 percent. And of the 30,000 Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the CIA reported in January 1998, “about half have arrived in the last decade, and the majority are impoverished former street-fighters from Beirut.”22
Throughout the Lebanese civil war, the various factions and sectarian elements of the Lebanese communities in Africa sent money back home to fund their respective groups’ militias. Setting the stage for the kind of fundraising tactics Hezbollah would later master, many of these factions engaged in a wide array of illicit financial dealings to raise the needed funds. Organized gangs sometimes attacked businesses in a Mafia-style racketeering scheme to pressure businessmen to “donate” to the cause.23
Particularly as Lebanese Sh
i’a gained visibility in West Africa, views of the Lebanese community deteriorated among existing inhabitants. By the 1980s “the [once] indispensable middlemen between town and country” in the Ivory Coast were seen as “racist … corruptors of others as well as being themselves corrupt.” Ivorians feared local Lebanese, regarding them as “a fifth column working towards the disintegration of the state.” The Lebanese, Ivorians feared, sought to “‘Palestinize’ or ‘Lebanize’ the Ivory Coast by securing a hold on key posts of the economy.” Their activities, a further fear held, would turn the country into a “haven of anti-Western lackeys of Hizbollah.”24
As Hezbollah gained ground and members at the expense of Amal back home in Lebanon, a similar trend occurred in Africa. Having set itself apart from Amal, and with other groups like Islamic Amal joining the Hezbollah fold, the choice between the two groups became increasingly stark. Writing in 1988, the CIA noted that “over the past two years—reflecting events in Lebanon—Hizballah’s presence in Africa has grown at the expense of Amal and other Muslim Lebanese factions.”25 Beyond ideological differences, financial incentives contributed to defections from Amal to Hezbollah, with the emergent group now offering “not only the virtue of ideological simplicity and authenticity, but the rewards of hard cash.” While Hezbollah enjoyed the benefits of generous funding from Iran, Amal relied on donations from Lebanese supporters even during the hard-hit economy of the 1980s.26 The loss of donations from Amal’s supporters among the Lebanese diaspora in Africa, therefore, not only paralleled defections from Amal to Hezbollah back home in Lebanon but may have contributed to the phenomenon in Africa as well.
In fact, Amal appears to have been forced to rely more heavily on coercive measures to raise funds in Africa as increasing numbers of supporters were drawn to Hezbollah. Threatening the welfare of relatives living back in Lebanon if “donations” were not paid, Amal, in 1986, was able to collect $1 million from Nigerian Lebanese, $500,000 from Ivorian Lebanese, and $400,000 from Liberian Lebanese. (In time, Hezbollah would adopt this tactic itself). As Amal and Hezbollah jockeyed for power back home, the CIA assessed that the “many Lebanese in Africa are likely to rally to Hizballah’s side and provide the movement with financial and material support.”27 That they did.
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